A Chain of Cities

One day in midwinter, some years since, during a journey fromRome to Florence perforce too rapid to allow much waysidesacrifice to curiosity, I waited for the train at Narni. Therewas time to stroll far enough from the station to have a look atthe famous old bridge of Augustus, broken short off in mid-Tiber.While I stood admiring the measure of impression was made tooverflow by the gratuitous grace of a white-cowled monk who cametrudging up the road that wound to the gate of the town. Narnistood, in its own presented felicity, on a hill a good spaceaway, boxed in behind its perfect grey wall, and the monk, tooblige me, crept slowly along and disappeared within theaperture. Everything was distinct in the clear air, and the viewexactly as like the bit of background by an Umbrian master as itideally should have been. The winter is bare and brown enough insouthern Italy and the earth reduced to more of a mere anatomythan among ourselves, for whom the very crânerie of itsexposed state, naked and unashamed, gives it much of the robustserenity, not of a fleshless skeleton, but of a fine nude statue.In these regions at any rate, the tone of the air, for the eye,during the brief desolation, has often an extraordinary charm:nature still smiles as with the deputed and provisional charityof colour and light, the duty of not ceasing to cheer man'sheart. Her whole behaviour, at the time, cast such a spell onthe broken bridge, the little walled town and the trudging friar,that I turned away with the impatient vow and the fond vision ofhow I would take the journey again and pause to my heart'scontent at Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, at Perugia, at Cortona,at Arezzo. But we have generally to clip our vows a little whenwe come to fulfil them; and so it befell that when my blestspringtime arrived I had to begin as resignedly as possible, yetwith comparative meagreness, at Assisi.

[Illustration: ASSISI.]

I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which it often lacksif we always did things at the moment we want to, for it's mostlywhen we can't that we're thoroughly sure we would, and wecan answer too little for moods in the future conditional. Winterat least seemed to me to have put something into these seats ofantiquity that the May sun had more or less melted away--adesirable strength of tone, a depth upon depth of queerness andquaintness. Assisi had been in the January twilight, after mymere snatch at Narni, a vignette out of some brown old missal.But you'll have to be a fearless explorer now to find of a finespring day any such cluster of curious objects as doesn't seemmade to match before anything else Mr. Baedeker's polyglotestimate of its chief recommendations. This great man was atAssisi in force, and a brand-new inn for his accommodation hasjust been opened cheek by jowl with the church of St. Francis. Idon't know that even the dire discomfort of this harbourage makesit seem less impertinent; but I confess I sought its protection,and the great view seemed hardly less beautiful from my windowthan from the gallery of the convent. This view embraces thewhole wide reach of Umbria, which becomes as twilight deepens apurple counterfeit of the misty sea. The visitor's first errandis with the church; and it's fair furthermore to admit that whenhe has crossed that threshold the position and quality of hishotel cease for the time to be matters of moment. This two-foldtemple of St. Francis is one of the very sacred places of Italy,and it would be hard to breathe anywhere an air more heavy withholiness. Such seems especially the case if you happen thus tohave come from Rome, where everything ecclesiastical is, inaspect, so very much of this world--so florid, so elegant, sofull of accommodations and excrescences. The mere site here makesfor authority, and they were brave builders who laid thefoundation-stones. The thing rises straight from a steepmountain-side and plunges forward on its great substructure ofarches even as a crowned headland may frown over the main. Beforeit stretches a long, grassy piazza, at the end of which you lookup a small grey street, to see it first climb a little way therest of the hill and then pause and leave a broad green slope,crested, high in the air, with a ruined castle. When I say beforeit I mean before the upper church; for by way of doing somethingsupremely handsome and impressive the sturdy architects of thethirteenth century piled temple upon temple and bequeathed adouble version of their idea. One may imagine them to haveintended perhaps an architectural image of the relation betweenheart and head. Entering the lower church at the bottom of thegreat flight of steps which leads from the upper door, you seemto push at least into the very heart of Catholicism.

For the first minutes after leaving the clearer gloom you catchnothing but a vista of low black columns closed by the greatfantastic cage surrounding the altar, which is thus placed, byyour impression, in a sort of gorgeous cavern. Gradually youdistinguish details, become accustomed to the penetrating chill,and even manage to make out a few frescoes ; but the generaleffect remains splendidly sombre and subterranean. The vaultedroof is very low and the pillars dwarfish, though immense ingirth, as befits pillars supporting substantially a cathedral.The tone of the place is a triumph of mystery, the richestharmony of lurking shadows and dusky corners, all relieved byscattered images and scintillations. There was little light butwhat came through the windows of the choir over which the redcurtains had been dropped and were beginning to glow with thedownward sun. The choir was guarded by a screen behind which adozen venerable voices droned vespers ; but over the top of thescreen came the heavy radiance and played among the ornaments ofthe high fence round the shrine, casting the shadow of the wholeelaborate mass forward into the obscured nave. The darkness ofvaults and side-chapels is overwrought with vague frescoes, mostof them by Giotto and his school, out of which confused richnessthe terribly distinct little faces characteristic of theseartists stare at you with a solemn formalism. Some are faded andinjured, and many so ill-lighted and ill-placed that you can onlyglance at them with decent conjecture; the great group, however--four paintings by Giotto on the ceiling above the altar--may beexamined with some success. Like everything of that grim andbeautiful master they deserve examination; but with the effectever of carrying one's appreciation in and in, as it were, ratherthan of carrying it out and out, off and off, as happens for uswith those artists who have been helped by the process of"evolution" to grow wings. This one, "going in" for emphasis atany price, stamps hard, as who should say, on the very spot ofhis idea--thanks to which fact he has a concentration that hasnever been surpassed. He was in other words, in proportion to hismeans, a genius supremely expressive; he makes the very shade ofan intended meaning or a represented attitude so unmistakablethat his figures affect us at moments as creatures all toosuddenly, too alarmingly, too menacingly met. Meagre, primitive,undeveloped, he yet is immeasurably strong; he even suggests thatif he had lived the due span of years later Michael Angelo mighthave found a rival. Not that he is given, however, to complicatedpostures or superhuman flights. The something strange thattroubles and haunts us in his work springs rather from a kind offierce familiarity.

It is part of the wealth of the lower church that it contains anadmirable primitive fresco by an artist of genius rarelyencountered, Pietro Cavallini, pupil of Giotto. This representsthe Crucifixion; the three crosses rising into a sky spotted withthe winged heads of angels while a dense crowd presses below. Youwill nowhere see anything more direfully lugubrious, or moreapproaching for direct force, though not of course for amplitudeof style, Tintoretto's great renderings of the scene in Venice.The abject anguish of the crucified and the straddling authorityand brutality of the mounted guards in the foreground arecontrasted in a fashion worthy of a great dramatist. But the mostpoignant touch is the tragic grimaces of the little angelic headsthat fall like hailstones through the dark air. It is genuinerealistic weeping, the act of irrepressible "crying," that thepainter has depicted, and the effect is pitiful at the same timeas grotesque. There are many more frescoes besides; all thechapels on one side are lined with them, but these are chieflyinteresting in their general impressiveness--as they people thedim recesses with startling presences, with apparitions out ofscale. Before leaving the place I lingered long near the door,for I was sure I shouldn't soon again enjoy such a feast ofscenic composition. The opposite end glowed with subdued colour;the middle portion was vague and thick and brown, with two orthree scattered worshippers looming through the obscurity; while,all the way down, the polished pavement, its uneven slabsglittering dimly in the obstructed light, was of the very essenceof expensive picture. It is certainly desirable, if one takes thelower church of St. Francis to represent the human heart, thatone should find a few bright places there. But if the generaleffect is of brightness terrorised and smothered, is the symbolless valid? For the contracted, prejudiced, passionate heart letit stand.

One thing at all events we can say, that we should rejoice toboast as capacious, symmetrical and well-ordered a head as theupper sanctuary. Thanks to these merits, in spite of a bravearray of Giottesque work which has the advantage of being easilyseen, it lacks the great character of its counterpart. Thefrescoes, which are admirable, represent certain leading eventsin the life of St. Francis, and suddenly remind you, by one ofthose anomalies that are half the secret of the consummatemise-en-scene of Catholicism, that the apostle ofbeggary, the saint whose only tenement in life was the raggedrobe which barely covered him, is the hero of this massivestructure. Church upon church, nothing less will adequatelyshroud his consecrated clay. The great reality of Giotto'sdesigns adds to the helpless wonderment with which we feel thepassionate pluck of the Hero, the sense of being separated fromit by an impassable gulf, the reflection on all that has come andgone to make morality at that vertiginous pitch impossible. Thereare no such high places of humility left to climb to. Anobservant friend who has lived long in Italy lately declared tome, however, that she detested the name of this moralist, deeminghim chief propagator of the Italian vice most trying to thewould-be lover of the people, the want of personal self-respect.There is a solidarity in the use of soap, and every cringingbeggar, idler, liar and pilferer flourished for her under theshadow of the great Francisan indifference to it. She waspossibly right; at Rome, at Naples, I might have admitted she wasright; but at Assisi, face to face with Giotto's vivid chronicle,we admire too much in its main subject the exquisite play of thatsubject's genius--we don't remit to him, and this for very envy,a single throb of his consciousness. It took in, that human, thatdivine embrace, everything but soap.

I should find it hard to give an orderly account of my nextadventures or impressions at Assisi, which could n't well beanything more than mere romantic flanerie. One may easilyplead as the final result of a meditation at the shrine of St.Francis a great and even an amused charity. This state of mindled me slowly up and down for a couple of hours through the steeplittle streets, and at last stretched itself on the grass with mein the shadow of the great ruined castle that decorates sograndly the eminence above the town. I remember edging along thesunless side of the small mouldy houses and pausing very often tolook at nothing in particular. It was all very hot, very hushed,very resignedly but very persistently old. A wheeled vehicle insuch a place is an event, and the forestiero'sinterrogative tread in the blank sonorous lanes has the privilegeof bringing the inhabitants to their doorways. Some of the betterhouses, however, achieve a sombre stillness that protests againstthe least curiosity as to what may happen in any such century asthis. You wonder, as you pass, what lingering old-world socialtypes vegetate there, but you won't find out; albeit that in onevery silent little street I had a glimpse of an open door which Ihave not forgotten. A long-haired peddler who must have been aJew, and who yet carried without prejudice a burden of mass-booksand rosaries, was offering his wares to a stout old priest. Thepriest had opened the door rather stingily and appeared half-heartedly to dismiss him. But the peddler held up something Icouldn't see; the priest wavered with a timorous concession toprofane curiosity and then furtively pulled the agent ofsophistication, or whatever it might be, into the house. I shouldhave liked to enter with that worthy.

I saw later some gentlemen of Assisi who also seemed bored enoughto have found entertainment in his tray. They were at the door ofthe cafe on the Piazza, and were so thankful to me for askingthem the way to the cathedral that, answering all in chorus, theylighted up with smiles as sympathetic as if I had done them afavour. Of that type were my mild, my delicate adventures. ThePiazza has a fine old portico of an ancient Temple of Minerva--six fluted columns and a pediment, of beautiful proportions, butsadly battered and decayed. Goethe, I believe, found it much moreinteresting than the mighty mediaeval church, and Goethe, as acicerone, doubtless could have persuaded one that it was so; butin the humble society of Murray we shall most of us find a richersense in the later monument. I found quaint old meanings enoughin the dark yellow facade of the small cathedral as I sat on astone bench by the oblong green stretched before it. This is apleasing piece of Italian Gothic and, like several of itscompanions at Assisi, has an elegant wheel window and a number ofgrotesque little carvings of creatures human and bestial. If withGoethe I were to balance anything against the attractions of thedouble church I should choose the ruined castle on the hill abovethe town. I had been having glimpses of it all the afternoon atthe end of steep street-vistas, and promising myself half-an-hourbeside its grey walls at sunset. The sun was very late setting,and my half-hour became a long lounge in the lee of an abutmentwhich arrested the gentle uproar of the wind. The castle is asplendid piece of ruin, perched on the summit of the mountain towhose slope Assisi clings and dropping a pair of stony arms toenclose the little town in its embrace. The city wall, in otherwords, straggles up the steep green hill and meets the crumblingskeleton of the fortress. On the side off from the town themountain plunges into a deep ravine, the opposite face of whichis formed by the powerful undraped shoulder of Monte Subasio, afierce reflector of the sun. Gorge and mountain are wild enough,but their frown expires in the teeming softness of the great valeof Umbria. To lie aloft there on the grass, with silver-greyramparts at one's back and the warm rushing wind in one's ears,and watch the beautiful plain mellow into the tones of twilight,was as exquisite a form of repose as ever fell to a tiredtourist's lot.

[Illustration: PERUGIA.]

Perugia too has an ancient stronghold, which one must speak of inearnest as that unconscious humorist the classic Americantraveller is supposed invariably to speak of the Colosseum: itwill be a very handsome building when it's finished. Even Perugiais going the way of all Italy--straightening out her streets,preparing her ruins, laying her venerable ghosts. The castle isbeing completely remis a neuf--a Massachusetts schoolhousecould n't cultivate a "smarter" ideal. There are shops in thebasement and fresh putty on all the windows; so that the onlything proper to a castle it has kept is its magnificent positionand range, which you may enjoy from the broad platform where thePerugini assemble at eventide. Perugia is chiefly known to fameas the city of Raphael's master; but it has a still higher claimto renown and ought to figure in the gazetteer of fond memory asthe little City of the infinite View. The small dusky, crookedplace tries by a hundred prompt pretensions, immediatecontortions, rich mantling flushes and other ingenuities, towaylay your attention and keep it at home; but yourconsciousness, alert and uneasy from the first moment, is allabroad even when your back is turned to the vast alternative orwhen fifty house-walls conceal it, and you are for ever rushingup by-streets and peeping round corners in the hope of anotherglimpse or reach of it. As it stretches away before you in thateminent indifference to limits which is at the same time at everystep an eminent homage to style, it is altogether too free andfair for compasses and terms. You can only say, and rest upon it,that you prefer it to any other visible fruit of position orclaimed empire of the eye that you are anywhere likely to enjoy.

For it is such a wondrous mixture of blooming plain and gleamingriver and wavily-multitudinous mountain vaguely dotted with palegrey cities, that, placed as you are, roughly speaking, in thecentre of Italy, you all but span the divine peninsula from seato sea. Up the long vista of the Tiber you look--almost to Rome;past Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Spoleto, all perched on theirrespective heights and shining through the violet haze. To thenorth, to the east, to the west, you see a hundred variations ofthe prospect, of which I have kept no record. Two notes only Ihave made: one--though who hasn't made it over and over again?--on the exquisite elegance of mountain forms in this endless playof the excrescence, it being exactly as if there were variationof sex in the upheaved mass, with the effect here mainly ofcontour and curve and complexion determined in the femininesense. It further came home to me that the command of such anoutlook on the world goes far, surely, to give authority andcentrality and experience, those of the great seats of dominion,even to so scant a cluster of attesting objects as here. It mustdeepen the civic consciousness and take off the edge of ennui. Itperforms this kindly office, at any rate, for the traveller whomay overstay his curiosity as to Perugino and the Etruscanrelics. It continually solicits his wonder and praise--itreinforces the historic page. I spent a week in the place, andwhen it was gone I had had enough of Perugino, but had n't hadenough of the View.

I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just howa week at Perugia may be spent. His first care must be to ignorethe very dream of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and verymuch at random, and to impute an esoteric sense to almostanything his eye may happen to encounter. Almost everything infact lends itself to the historic, the romantic, the æstheticfallacy--almost everything has an antique queerness and richnessthat ekes out the reduced state; that of a grim and battered oldadventuress, the heroine of many shames and scandals, survivingto an extraordinary age and a considerable penury, but withancient gifts of princes and other forms of the wages of sin toshow, and the most beautiful garden of all the world to sit anddoze and count her beads in and remember. He must hang a greatdeal about the huge Palazzo Pubblico, which indeed is very wellworth any acquaintance you may scrape with it. It masses itselfgloomily above the narrow street to an immense elevation, andleads up the eye along a cliff-like surface of rugged wall,mottled with old scars and new repairs, to the loggia dizzilyperched on its cornice. He must repeat his visit to the EtruscanGate, by whose immemorial composition he must indeed linger longto resolve it back into the elements originally attending it. Hemust uncap to the irrecoverable, the inimitable style of thestatue of Pope Julius III before the cathedral, remembering thatHawthorne fabled his Miriam, in an air of romance from which weare well-nigh as far to-day as from the building of Etruscangates, to have given rendezvous to Kenyon at its base. Itsmaterial is a vivid green bronze, and the mantle and tiara arecovered with a delicate embroidery worthy of a silver-smith.

Then our leisurely friend must bestow on Perugino's frescoes inthe Exchange, and on his pictures in the University, all theplacid contemplation they deserve. He must go to the theatreevery evening, in an orchestra-chair at twenty-two soldi, andenjoy the curious didacticism of "Amore senza Stima," "Severita eDebolezza," "La Societa Equivoca," and other popular specimens ofcontemporaneous Italian comedy--unless indeed the last-named benot the edifying title applied, for peninsular use, to "Le Demi-Monde" of the younger Dumas. I shall be very much surprised if,at the end of a week of this varied entertainment, he hasn'tlearnt how to live, not exactly in, but with, Perugia. Hisstrolls will abound in small accidents and mercies of vision, butof which a dozen pencil-strokes would be a better memento thanthis poor word-sketching. From the hill on which the town isplanted radiate a dozen ravines, down whose sides the housesslide and scramble with an alarming indifference to the cohesionof their little rugged blocks of flinty red stone. You ramblereally nowhither without emerging on some small court or terracethat throws your view across a gulf of tangled gardens orvineyards and over to a cluster of serried black dwellings whichhave to hollow in their backs to keep their balance on theopposite ledge. On archways and street-staircases and dark alleysthat bore through a density of massive basements, and curve andclimb and plunge as they go, all to the truest mediaeval tune,you may feast your fill. These are the local, the architectural,the compositional commonplaces.. Some of the little streets inout-of-the-way corners are so rugged and brown and silent thatyou may imagine them passages long since hewn by the pick-axe ina deserted stone-quarry. The battered black houses, of the colourof buried things--things buried, that is, in accumulations oftime, closer packed, even as such are, than spadefuls of earth--resemble exposed sections of natural rock; none the less so when,beyond some narrow gap, you catch the blue and silver of thesublime circle of landscape.

[Illustration: ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA.]

But I ought n't to talk of mouldy alleys, or yet of azuredistances, as if they formed the main appeal to taste in thisaccomplished little city. In the Sala del Cambio, where inancient days the money-changers rattled their embossed coin andfigured up their profits, you may enjoy one of the serenestaesthetic pleasures that the golden age of art anywhere offersus. Bank parlours, I believe, are always handsomely appointed,but are even those of Messrs. Rothschild such models of muralbravery as this little counting-house of a bygone fashion? Thebravery is Perugino's own; for, invited clearly to do his best,he left it as a lesson to the ages, covering the four low wallsand the vault with scriptural and mythological figures ofextraordinary beauty. They are ranged in artless attitudes roundthe upper half of the room--the sibyls, the prophets, thephilosophers, the Greek and Roman heroes--looking down with broadserene faces, with small mild eyes and sweet mouths that committhem to nothing in particular unless to being comfortably andcharmingly alive, at the incongruous proceedings of a Board ofBrokers. Had finance a very high tone in those days, or weregenius and faith then simply as frequent as capital andenterprise are among ourselves? The great distinction of the Saladel Cambio is that it has a friendly Yes for both thesequestions. There was a rigid transactional probity, it seems tosay; there was also a high tide of inspiration. About the artisthimself many things come up for us--more than I can attempt intheir order; for he was not, I think, to an attentive observer,the mere smooth and entire and devout spirit we at first areinclined to take him for. He has that about him which leads us towonder if he may not, after all, play a proper part enough hereas the patron of the money-changers. He is the delight of amillion of young ladies; but who knows whether we should n't findin his works, might we "go into" them a little, a trifle more ofmanner than of conviction, and of system than of deep sincerity?

This, I allow, would put no great affront on them, and onespeculates thus partly but because it's a pleasure to hang abouthim on any pretext, and partly because his immediate effect is tomake us quite inordinately embrace the pretext of his lovelysoul. His portrait, painted on the wall of the Sala (you may seeit also in Rome and Florence) might at any rate serve for thelikeness of Mr. Worldly-Wiseman in Bunyan's allegory. He wasfond of his glass, I believe, and he made his art lucrative. Thistradition is not refuted by his preserved face, and after someexperience--or rather after a good deal, since you can't have alittle of Perugino, who abounds wherever old masterscongregate, so that one has constantly the sense of being "in"for all there is--you may find an echo of it in the uniform typeof his creatures, their monotonous grace, their prodigiousinvariability. He may very well have wanted to produce figures ofa substantial, yet at the same time of an impeccable innocence;but we feel that he had taught himself how even beyond hisown belief in them, and had arrived at a process that acted atlast mechanically. I confess at the same time that, sointerpreted, the painter affects me as hardly less interesting,and one can't but become conscious of one's style when one'sstyle has become, as it were, so conscious of one's, or at leastof its own, fortune. If he was the inventor of a remarkablycalculable facture, a calculation that never fails is inits way a grace of the first order, and there are things in thisspecial appearance of perfection of practice that make him theforerunner of a mighty and more modern race. More than any of theearly painters who strongly charm, you may take all his measurefrom a single specimen. The other samples infallibly match,reproduce unerringly the one type he had mastered, but which hadthe good fortune to be adorably fair, to seem to have dawned on avision unsullied by the shadows of earth. Which truth, moreover,leaves Perugino all delightful as composer and draughtsman; hehas in each of these characters a sort of spacious neatnesswhich suggests that the whole conception has been washed clean bysome spiritual chemistry the last thing before reaching thecanvas; after which it has been applied to that surface with arare economy of time and means. Giotto and Fra Angelico, besidehim, are full of interesting waste and irrelevant passion. In thesacristy of the charming church of San Pietro--a museum ofpictures and carvings--is a row of small heads of saintsformerly covering the frame of the artist's Ascension, carriedoff by the French. It is almost miniature work, and here atleast Perugino triumphs in sincerity, in apparent candour, aswell as in touch. Two of the holy men are reading theirbreviaries, but with an air of infantine innocence quiteconsistent with their holding the book upside down.

Between Perugia and Cortona lies the large weedy water of LakeThrasymene, turned into a witching word for ever by Hannibal'srecorded victory over Rome. Dim as such records have become to usand remote such realities, he is yet a passionless pilgrim whodoes n't, as he passes, of a heavy summer's day, feel the air andthe light and the very faintness of the breeze all charged andhaunted with them, all interfused as with the wasted ache ofexperience and with the vague historic gaze. Processions ofindistinguishable ghosts bore me company to Cortona itself, moststurdily ancient of Italian towns. It must have been a seat ofancient knowledge even when Hannibal and Flaminius came to theshock of battle, and have looked down afar from its grey rampartson the contending swarm with something of the philosophiccomposure suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic and Etruscanrevolutions. These grey ramparts are in great part still visible,and form the chief attraction of Cortona. It is perched on thevery pinnacle of a mountain, and I wound and doubled interminablyover the face of the great hill, while the jumbled roofs andtowers of the arrogant little city still seemed nearer to the skythan to the railway-station. "Rather rough," Murray pronouncesthe local inn; and rough indeed it was; there was scarce a squarefoot of it that you would have cared to stroke with your hand.The landlord himself, however, was all smoothness and the bestfellow in the world; he took me up into a rickety old loggia onthe tip-top of his establishment and played showman as to halfthe kingdoms of the earth. I was free to decide at the same timewhether my loss or my gain was the greater for my seeing Cortonathrough the medium of a festa. On the one hand the museum wasclosed (and in a certain sense the smaller and obscurer the townthe more I like the museum); the churches--an interesting note ofmanners and morals--were impenetrably crowded, though, for thatmatter, so was the cafe, where I found neither an empty stool northe edge of a table. I missed a sight of the famous paintedMuse, the art-treasure of Cortona and supposedly the mostprecious, as it falls little short of being the only, sample ofthe Greek painted picture that has come down to us. On the otherhand, I saw--but this is what I saw.

[Illustration: A STREET, CORTONA.]

A part of the mountain-top is occupied by the church of St.Margaret, and this was St. Margaret's day. The houses pauseroundabout it and leave a grassy slope, planted here and therewith lean black cypresses. The contadini from near and far hadcongregated in force and were crowding into the church or windingup the slope. When I arrived they were all kneeling or uncovered;a bedizened procession, with banners and censers, bearing abroad,I believe, the relics of the saint, was re-entering the church.The scene made one of those pictures that Italy still brushes infor you with an incomparable hand and from an inexhaustiblepalette when you find her in the mood. The day was superb--thesky blazed overhead like a vault of deepest sapphire. The gravebrown peasantry, with no great accent of costume, but with sundrysmall ones--decked, that is, in cheap fineries of scarlet andyellow--made a mass of motley colour in the high wind-stirredlight. The procession halted in the pious hush, and the lovelyland around and beneath us melted away, almost to either sea, intones of azure scarcely less intense than the sky. Behind thechurch was an empty crumbling citadel, with half-a-dozen oldwomen keeping the gate for coppers. Here were views and breezesand sun and shade and grassy corners to the heart's content,together with one could n't say what huge seated mysticmelancholy presence, the after-taste of everything the still openmaw of time had consumed. I chose a spot that fairly combined allthese advantages, a spot from which I seemed to look, as whoshould say, straight down the throat of the monster, no darkpassage now, but with all the glorious day playing into it, andspent a good part of my stay at Cortona lying there at my lengthand observing the situation over the top of a volume that I musthave brought in my pocket just for that especial wanton luxury ofthe resource provided and slighted. In the afternoon I came downand hustled a while through the crowded little streets, and thenstrolled forth under the scorching sun and made the outer circuitof the wall. There I found tremendous uncemented blocks; theyglared and twinkled in the powerful light, and I had to put on ablue eye-glass in order to throw into its proper perspective thevague Etruscan past, obtruded and magnified in such masses quiteas with the effect of inadequately-withdrawn hands and feet inphotographs.

I spent the next day at Arezzo, but I confess in very much thesame uninvestigating fashion--taking in the "generalimpression," I dare say, at every pore, but rather systematicallyleaving the dust of the ages unfingered on the stored records: Ishould doubtless, in the poor time at my command, have fingeredit to so little purpose. The seeker for the story of things hasmoreover, if he be worth his salt, a hundred insidious arts; andin that case indeed--by which I mean when his sensibility hascome duly to adjust itself--the story assaults him but from toomany sides. He even feels at moments that he must sneak along ontiptoe in order not to have too much of it. Besides which thecase all depends on the kind of use, the range of application,his tangled consciousness, or his intelligible genius, say, maycome to recognize for it. At Arezzo, however this might be, onewas far from Rome, one was well within genial Tuscany, and thehistoric, the romantic decoction seemed to reach one's lips inless stiff doses. There at once was the "general impression"--theexquisite sense of the scarce expressible Tuscan quality, whichmakes immediately, for the whole pitch of one's perception, agrateful, a not at all strenuous difference, attaches to almostany coherent group of objects, to any happy aspect of the scene,for a main note, some mild recall, through pleasant friendlycolour, through settled ample form, through something homely andeconomic too at the very heart of "style," of an identity oftemperament and habit with those of the divine little Florencethat one originally knew. Adorable Italy in which, for theconstant renewal of interest, of attention, of affection, theserefinements of variety, these so harmoniously-grouped andindividually-seasoned fruits of the great garden of history, keeppresenting themselves! It seemed to fall in with the cheerfulTuscan mildness for instance--sticking as I do to thatineffectual expression of the Tuscan charm, of the yellow-brownTuscan dignity at large--that the ruined castle on the hill (withwhich agreeable feature Arezzo is no less furnished than Assisiand Cortona) had been converted into a great blooming, and I hopeall profitable, podere or market-garden. I lounged away the half-hours there under a spell as potent as the "wildest" forecast ofpropriety--propriety to all the particular conditions--could havefigured it. I had seen Santa Maria della Pieve and its campanileof quaint colonnades, the stately, dusky cathedral--grass-plottedand residenced about almost after the fashion of an English"close"--and John of Pisa's elaborate marble shrine; I had seenthe museum and its Etruscan vases and majolica platters. Thesewere very well, but the old pacified citadel somehow, through aday of soft saturation, placed me most in relation. Beautifulhills surrounded it, cypresses cast straight shadows at itscorners, while in the middle grew a wondrous Italian tangle ofwheat and corn, vines and figs, peaches and cabbages, memoriesand images, anything and everything.